COVER FEATURE

Super Hero IT

Oracle engineered systems, storage, and analytics support the Avengers.

Yes, your data center is powerful. But is it powerful enough to protect the nations and peoples of Earth from all threats, terrestrial or extraterrestrial? If you’re Agent John Smith, it better be.

Smith is the chief systems administrator for the Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.), where he works for Nick Fury. And just as Fury must assemble the Avengers to battle threats to the world that no one else can handle, Smith must assemble the most powerful data center to deliver extreme performance and Earth-saving analytics.

A seven-year S.H.I.E.L.D. veteran, Smith has seen a lot of technology come and go. Some of it is retired, and updated hardware and software take its place. At S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, in the Helicarrier, and in field offices around the world, some hardware is retired by force.

“An Asgardian’s hammer really does a number on these infrastructures. We’re using Kevlar and a lot of classified materials in the housings of our server and storage hardware, but superpowers give IT a run for its money,” says Smith.

Reassemble

Oracle Magazine caught up with Smith after a classified incident destroyed all of the legacy data center hardware at a previously secret S.H.I.E.L.D. lab. Smith seemed surprisingly upbeat as he looked at scorched pieces of hardware where dozens of racks of state-of-the-art systems once stood.

“Today, we’re rolling in Oracle engineered systems, so recovering from this kind of event is easy,” Smith says. “The intelligence we deliver enables S.H.I.E.L.D. to complete its missions, so high availability and performance are paramount. The faster we can assemble the data center and deliver vital information, the better.”

“We chose Oracle Exadata because it provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and OLTP [online transaction processing] applications, and its architecture is highly scalable, secure, and redundant,” says Smith. “As a result, our agents—and of course, the Avengers—get the right information at the right time and can make better decisions to be more effective in day-to-day operations and in battle.”

S.H.I.E.L.D. systems connect thousands of agents and exabytes of classified information in international operations. The frontline data gathering and analysis applications run in a secure private cloud, so building them in Java and running them on Oracle Exalogic machines makes perfect sense to Smith. “Oracle Exalogic is engineered for cloud computing,” says Smith. “It’s tested and tuned for Java applications, and it delivers extreme performance.”

S.H.I.E.L.D. takes in terabytes of information every day, from surveillance video to satellites, threat sensors, field reports, network traffic, and more. This high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety data must be processed in batch and in parallel, filtered, transformed, and sorted before it is loaded into an enterprise data warehouse. For that tall task, Smith and S.H.I.E.L.D. rely on Oracle Big Data Appliance, an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing, and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g. “Every day we load massive amounts of mission-critical intel into Oracle Big Data Appliance, and it handles everything we give it,” says Smith.

Intelligence, planning, and analytics play prominent roles in protecting Earth from all threats, and Oracle Exalytics supports those roles for S.H.I.E.L.D. As an in-memory BI machine, it delivers the extreme performance S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to succeed. “When assessing threats, S.H.I.E.L.D. has to quickly draw actionable insights from massive amounts of data,” says Smith. “Oracle Exalytics is our go-to enterprise BI platform, and its advanced data visualization and exploration get the job done.”

Supreme Storage

With S.H.I.E.L.D.’s international jurisdiction comes a massive amount of data, both structured and unstructured—all of which needs to be securely stored, backed up, and perpetually available.

To address SAN storage requirements, Smith turns to the next-generation SAN architecture of the Pillar Axiom 600 storage system.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. agents place pretty high demands on the data center,” says Smith. “The storage provided by the Pillar Axiom 600 enables us to meet some very particular and strict service-level agreements [SLAs], prioritize data access across the system, and ensure that all applications get what they need when they need it.”

Because the volume and value of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s data grows exponentially, Smith uses Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system to help him manage complexity, control costs, and deliver on SLAs.

“Considering the massive volume of data we need to back up, the StorageTek SL8500 is well equipped. It’s an exabyte storage system with 24/7 high-availability features,” says Smith.

Knowing that a superpowered disaster can strike anywhere at any time, S.H.I.E.L.D. operates mirrored Oracle engineered compute and storage systems in multiple locations worldwide in a highly secure private cloud configuration. As Smith’s tech teams complete the connections between the Oracle engineered compute and storage systems, they begin data recovery from tape and other systems in the S.H.I.E.L.D. private cloud.

Smart, Agile, Aligned

At The Center of Extreme Data - pdf

Oracle engineered systems and storage have an obvious presence in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s rebuilt data center, but S.H.I.E.L.D. also depends on additional software to analyze and manage its own unique operation. For Smith, analytics and enterprise performance management are among the most important software deployed at S.H.I.E.L.D.